A McBurnie Coachcraft Daytona Spyder replica on a Corvette chassis, the type of car Crockett drove in Miami Vice's early seasons. Representative image, not a screen-used car. Photo: Cyberuly via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0
The movie Universal confirmed this week is in production is set in 1985, the stretch of Miami Vice when Sonny Crockett’s black Ferrari Daytona Spyder was a fiberglass body on a Corvette chassis.
Universal announced production on Oct. 12 through a new X account, @miami_vice85, with two images and two lines: “Michael B. Jordan is Tubbs. Austin Butler is Crockett.” The account’s bio carries the release date, May 19, 2028. Joseph Kosinski, who directed Top Gun: Maverick and F1 (a sequel to which is now in development), is directing from a script by Dan Gilroy and Eric Warren Singer.
The images are portraits against a gray studio backdrop. Jordan wears a black leather trench coat over a dark shirt and tie, pistol held low. Butler is mid-lunge in a gray jacket, gun up, with a gold watch on his wrist and a tan shoulder holster under his arm. There is no car in either frame, and no water or skyline. The first set photos, published by Just Jared the same day, put Butler in a pale blue shirt and white pants outside a liquor store in Wayne, New Jersey.
Universal hasn’t said what Crockett drives. Its logline says the film is “inspired by the pilot episode and first season” of the series, and Kosinski told Variety last year that the film takes place in 1985. Both put the story inside the Daytona years.
Season one’s Ferrari
NBC aired the pilot on Sept. 16, 1984. The Daytona in it came from Tom McBurnie’s McBurnie Coachcraft, which built two replicas on C3 Corvette chassis, one for close-ups and one for stunts, according to the description on a later McBurnie-style car sold through Hagerty Marketplace in 2025. Ferrari sued McBurnie. The show blew the car up early in season three, and Ferrari supplied two 1986 Testarossas to replace it.
Ferrari won. A federal court in Southern California found in 1989 that the Daytona Spyder’s shape had acquired secondary meaning, the legal test for protecting a design consumers link to one maker, and enjoined McBurnie’s replicas. Ferrari then went after McBurnie’s former partner, Carl Roberts, and in 1991 the Sixth Circuit upheld a permanent injunction against his cars. Ferrari’s survey evidence in that case found 68 percent of respondents could not tell a photo of the McBurnie replica from a photo of a real Daytona Spyder.
Roberts sold his version, the Miami Spyder, mostly as an $8,500 kit, or about $50,000 turnkey. The body was a one-piece fiberglass shell bolted to a donor car “such as a Chevrolet Corvette or a Pontiac Fiero,” the court wrote.
The opinion also records that Roberts “originally built the Miami Coupe,” his Testarossa copy, for the producers of Miami Vice “to be used as a stunt car in place of the more expensive Ferrari Testarossa.” A new Testarossa sold for about $230,000 at the time, per the court. So the Testarossa era had a fiberglass stand-in built for it too.
What a real Daytona costs
The Sixth Circuit put Daytona production at 1,400 cars, with only 100 originally built as Spyders. Sotheby’s, whose RM Sotheby’s arm sells them, counts 121. It sold a 1972 365 GTS/4 Spider for $3.98 million in May 2024 and a 1973 car for $3.59 million in November 2023.
The Corvette-based re-creation on Hagerty Marketplace, with a 190-hp 5.7-liter V8, a five-speed manual, a fiberglass body and a 175-mph speedometer, sold for $32,100 with no reserve in June 2025.
That leaves Kosinski’s crew three ways to put Crockett in a Ferrari in 1985. They can use a real Spider worth roughly $4 million, of which Sotheby’s counts 121 in existence. They can build a replica of a shape Ferrari has already defended in two federal courts. Or they can use the Testarossa, which Ferrari unveiled at the Paris Motor Show in October 1984. It would be correct for the calendar year and wrong for season one, since the white cars didn’t arrive until season three.
Universal’s X account has posted exactly once. The release lands May 19, 2028, two weeks ahead of Days of Thunder 2 on June 2. Neither the post nor the logline names a car.
Which should Crockett drive in 1985: a $4 million real Daytona, a Corvette-based fake like the original, or a Testarossa two seasons early?
Sources: Universal Pictures’ @miami_vice85 post, Oct. 12, 2026; Ferrari S.p.A. v. Roberts, 944 F.2d 1235 (6th Cir. 1991), citing Ferrari S.p.A. v. McBurnie, 11 U.S.P.Q.2d 1843 (S.D. Cal. 1989); Hagerty Marketplace auction listing, June 2025; RM Sotheby’s sale results; Ferrari.
About the Author
